How To Lose Friends & Alienate People

Simon Pegg is Sidney Young, a young, arrogant celebrity-ridiculing journalist with his own nothing-magazine in London when he is hired to Sharpe's Magazine in New York. It's essentially a film of two halves. The first half of the film is a standard, fish-out-of-water comedy, with Pegg's Young completely failing to conform to all of the expected norms, other than the cliché of Englishman-in-America films. It then transforms, halfway through, to a pretty generic romantic comedy, with Kirsten Dunst providing the romantic interest, and not much else.

Let me be perfectly honest here - this film has very little other than Simon Pegg's likeability going for it. It's not all that funny (although Megan Fox's claim "I'm going to have my own logo" left me guffawing away like a moron). It's not all that shocking. None of the characters are all that interesting, either, if we're honest. The real problem is that the film falls into too many of the clichés of its own medium to hold much weight poking fun at any other one.

Pretty damn bland, to be honest. It's a testament to Simon Pegg's likeability that this film didn't drop a whole grade. Let's hope that this is merely a blip on his career and not the beginning of his decent into mediocrity. C+.